Help me automate my youtube channel
I made the MrPowerScripts YouTube channel on Jan 5, 2012. Very close to seven years old! How wild is that? After making over one hundred videos my channel has 373,803+ views. It feels really great knowing I’ve helped so many people save time by scripting, programming, and developing. I’ve had so much fun with it, and I want to see it continue to grow. And this is always the challenge with growing up, right? I’m finding I have less to spend on hours and hours cutting up video. Doing in-depth research about a subject so I don’t get called out for being inaccurate in the comments. Reviewing, making the thumbnails, doing conversions and more reviews after reviews after reviews.
I’m exhausted just thinking about all of it. I started blogging and it’s great. I love writing, and this has given me an opportunity to write more and share thoughts in a different way. But videos have always been my thing.
I began making tech videos because I love learning from videos. Sometimes hearing someone explain something is really the key to making it click. To combine that with visuals that help illustrate the spoken ideas is an amazing opportunity for learning.
Powershell wasn’t as very well known or popular of a tool back in 2012. I thought it was my opportunity to share how I was saving time at work and automating various tasks with scripts. I made the channel and started uploading videos about it.
You can see through the history of the channel I learned some new things over time. Switched into different kinds of subjects about tech. Started to focus a bit more on general development. Where could I possibly go next? What is my goal here? What is the end game for this channel? I’ve been asking myself that quite a bit, and I think I have an amazing answer. I want to automate the entire youtube channel.
Wait, what? Automate? How? Videos don’t just fall out of the sky! You can’t just set up some sort of video collection system that catches videos from the sky and puts them through some processing facility that purifies these sky videos and bottles them to be sold at the purified sky videos mart down the street. it’s not possible! And you would be right if we were talking about sky videos. Because that’s not a thing. But we’re not. I feel like I can do this.
The whole point of the channel is to teach people how to automate things so they can get more done in less time. This is the perfect solution to my conundrum. I can continue to work on the channel but streamline the production process so that it can continue to grow in new ways. Maybe ways I don’t even expect. More on that in a bit.
This is definitely not one of those overnight things, but I think the channel is in a good place for me to try something like this. I’ve been thinking about different ways to approach this. I feel like I have a fairly rough idea of what I need and where this can go. It will take baby steps and learning over time. The key thing to remember is that I won’t be able to do this on my own.
Obviously, first off, this is going to cost money. The channel does earn a bit of money. Around 33 dollars a month at the moment. Though I don’t think that’s going to be enough to get a video production pipeline moving. Want to help me? The laziest option is to support me on my new Patreon page. From there you can subscribe and support me with as little as $1 a month. You’ll also get the Supporter role on my new Discord server automatically. More on why that’s important later.
Looking for more interesting ways to help me automate my YouTube channel? That’s great! Money isn’t everything. Coming to the Discord server with ideas, or helping to create content for videos is amazingly helpful. I really think people should be paid for their work though. I know if I want to automate a channel that makes videos it’s going to come at a cost. This might be where I have to start with this process. Become a budget Youtube production channel. I’ll be the RyanAir of youtube tech videos.
I’ll have to start by spending money out of my own pocket to work with video editors, writers, and voice over artists to help put the production together. I have literally produced all of the work for the past seven years. I’ve never outsourced any of the efforts. So it would be interesting to see how working with others changes the channels feel. And I don’t mean professionals haha. No no, no way I can afford professionals right now. I mean literally anyone who will work at bargain prices.
Maybe someone who is learning how to do video editing and can accomplish simple work. Maybe someone who wants to get into doing voice overs. Maybe other people like me who started by learning from youtube videos. If you have an interest in any of those things stop by the Discord server. At one point I aspired to learn how to do all those things myself. That would be an interesting way to get this process going. If others learned the same way I learned but were able to earn some money for their efforts as well. We’ll see if anyone manages to find this with interest.
Money, community, or both. Those are key to driving this idea forward. Now, remember I did say automate the channel. Meaning that the whole process starting from generation of a video idea to storyboarding to creating scenes to putting it all together for a final product that uploads itself to youtube is the goal. Really. Like full on automating everything. Now I don’t have the means to create the artificial intelligence necessary that could do all of that work for me. So I’ll still need help from other peoples brains. How sad is that? Where’s my Rosie the robot? Actually, maybe I would prefer to have a Bender around.
My initial thought is to democratize decisions through votes. How can I possibly do that? Do you remember earlier when I said that donating to my Patreon gives you the Supporter role in my Discord server? People with the supporter role will be able to vote on events in the video creation process. A while ago I wrote a Discord bot that manages a Discord server as a karaoke competition. You can vote on who is performing using emoji. It’s a neat idea that never really gained traction, so I’m not exactly sure if it totally works! You can see it in action if you go to [https://BattleNationLive.com](https://battlenationlive.com].
I’d like to take this bot and modify the voting system to work for people with the Supporter role, so they can vote on different parts of the video creation process. Maybe on which idea for the next video. Or which voice-over artist to use. Eventually, if I find some great people to work with they can be added to submit content to be voted on as well. Imagine a script has been submitted and voted on. Now someone creates a voice-over for the scene and a separate visual for the scene. Those two elements are both voted on and approved. They can be automatically combined for everyone to preview. A process flow for building out videos can develop. It will all be very manual to start out, but once the bot and voting are in place things can become very interesting from there.
Now people who are supporting the channel through [Patreon][https://www.patreon.com/MrPowerScripts) have a voice! Democracy is alive! There is a relationship between those supporting the channel and the direction that the channel takes. Which, means, once the pipeline is complete the channel may not even be about tech anymore. It could be about anything really. I wouldn’t have much of a say. If this idea is successful there will be enough money and decision makers available through Patreon and Discord driving the content creation process. There could be a new video every week for me to sit back and enjoy. After seven years of making them myself I think it would be nice!